FanLit welcomes our regular guest Stephen Frank. He’s a big fan of Carrie Vaughn’s KITTY NORVILLE series and he had a chance to talk with her about the newest installment which was released today. Thanks, Stephen! We are pleased to have with us today Carrie Vaughn, bestselling author as well as the ingenious creator of my […]
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Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn Kitty Norville is a radio DJ that hosts a late night talk show about various paranormal topics. She often gets strange calls from the very subjects she talks about. She usually ends up giving out advice to these callers since they have very few options for advice […]
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Kitty Goes to Washington by Carrie Vaughn Kitty Goes to Washington, by Carrie Vaughn, is the second book in the long-running Kitty Norville series. I enjoyed the first book, Kitty and the Midnight Hour, enough that I read the second at the first opportunity. Kitty Goes to Washington picks up immediately after the events of […]
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Kitty and the Silver Bullet by Carrie Vaughn Carrie Vaughn’s KITTY NORVILLE series is yet another example of what’s happened to the typical urban fantasy series. For the most part, you could take stories we’ve seen before, cut and paste pieces of them together, and getKitty and the Silver Bullet. Kitty, an infected werewolf, is still an […]
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Kitty’s House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn Kitty’s House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn is a solid addition to the story of radio talk-show host Kitty the werewolf that began with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. I’ve enjoyed the entire Kitty series and House of Horrors was no exception. In Kitty’s House of Horrors, Kitty and her friends, including several […]
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Discord’s Apple by Carrie Vaughn Evie Walker is a comic book writer who is to inherit a magical storeroom from her terminally ill father. Unbeknownst to her, it has been the duty of her family for thousands of years to keep this storeroom safe. The storeroom contains artifacts from myth and legend, such as the […]
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The Urban Fantasy Anthology edited by Peter S. Beagle & Joe R. Lansdale It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of most urban fantasy. I tend to find problems with almost every urban fantasy book I’ve tried to read. When I got this book in the mail, I kind of rolled my eyes and […]
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After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn After the Golden Age, by Carrie Vaughn, is a likable enough novel that takes the world of comic book superheroes and filters it through a more realistic prism, focusing more on a family and character, with the usual superhero action scenes playing more in the background. Unfortunately, what […]
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Dreams of the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn Dreams of the Golden Age is the follow up to Carrie Vaughn’s After the Golden Age, to which I gave only a middling review thanks to issues of plotting and characterization. While the sequel suffers from some of the same problems, they crop up less frequently and […]
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Martians Abroad by Carrie Vaughn In Martians Abroad (2017), Carrie Vaughn re-envisions aspects of the “juvenile” novel Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein, turning his classic spacefaring story into something refreshing and new while retaining the sense of limitless adventure. Kat has mentioned in her reviews of Heinlein’s juveniles that they were instrumental in […]
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Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn In Bannerless (2017), Carrie Vaughn ― perhaps best known for her KITTY NORVILLE urban fantasy series inhabited by werewolves and vampires ― has created a reflective, deliberately paced post-apocalyptic tale with some detective fiction mixed in. It’s about a hundred years in our world’s future and after an event simply called […]
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The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn Carrie Vaughn continues the fascinating post-apocalyptic BANNERLESS SAGA in The Wild Dead (2018), the first sequel to her Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel Bannerless. Murders are, thankfully, few and far between along the Coast Road, so it’s been about a year since Enid of Haven has needed to put […]
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Reposting to include Tadiana’s new review. The Ghosts of Sherwood by Carrie Vaughn The Ghosts of Sherwood (2020), a novella by Carrie Vaughn, was for me a frustrating story, with several strong aspects but also some elements that drove me crazy, leaving me overall disappointed but hopeful for its follow-up, The Heirs of Locksley. As […]
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The Heirs of Locksley by Carrie Vaughn The adventures of Robin Hood’s three children continue in The Heirs of Locksley, the second novella in Carrie Vaughn‘s ROBIN HOOD STORIES series. It takes a unexpected four-year leap forward from The Ghosts of Sherwood. The eldest, Mary, is now twenty and still hasn’t met the young man […]
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Apex Magazine is a monthly e-magazine that publishes two short stories, one reprint story, a nonfiction piece and an interview in each issue, together with the occasional poem. In the three issues I read, the reprint fiction tended to outshine the original fiction — which doesn’t mean the original fiction was bad, just that it […]
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Issue 9 of Nightmare opens with “The House on Cobb Street” by Lynda E. Rucker. There is a long italicized quotation from a purported learned treatise about the house at the top of the story, reciting the history of so-called Cobb Street Horror, but noting that the witnesses have refused to speak to the author. […]
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Fantasy Magazine was folded into Lightspeed Magazine in 2012, but it came out of retirement in October 2014 for the Women Destroy Fantasy issue, one of the stretch goals of a Kickstarter for an all-women edition of Lightspeed. I was one of the contributors to the Kickstarter, and, as my review last week revealed, I […]
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Carrie Vaughn opens Issue 169 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies with “Sun, Stone, Spear,” a story about as different from her KITTY NORVILLE series as it seems possible to get. Two young women, Elu and the narrator, Mahra, have decided to leave their home village; Mahra seeks adventure, while Elu wishes to be the chief astronomer […]
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There is so much free or inexpensive short fiction available on the internet these days. Here are a few stories we read this week that we wanted you to know about. “The Cage” by A.M. Dellamonica (2010, free online at Tor.com or purchase Kindle version) “The Cage,” a stand-alone short story by A.M. Dellamonica, was published […]
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There is so much free or inexpensive short fiction available on the internet these days. Here are a few stories we read this week that we wanted you to know about. “Doctor Kitty Solves All Your Love Problems” by Carrie Vaughn (2001, originally published in Weird Tales 324 (Summer 2001), free on the author’s website) Kitty […]
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There is so much free or inexpensive short fiction available on the internet these days. Here are a few stories we read this week that we wanted you to know about. “More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand” by Rosamund Hodge (2010, free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 99c Kindle magazine issue) Violet always knew she […]
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Our weekly exploration of short fiction, old and new, available on the internet. “Alexandria” by Monica Byrne (Jan. 2017, Fantasy & Science Fiction Jan/Feb 2017 issue) They were travelers, though of the domestic sort. After their terrible honeymoon, they’d never left Kansas again. Monica Byrne is a playwright and fiction writer who won the James Tiptree […]
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Our weekly sampling of free or inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are some great stories that caught our eyes this week: “A Kiss With Teeth” by Max Gladstone (2014, free at Tor.com, 99c Kindle Version) Within the first two paragraphs “A Kiss With Teeth” has outlined an unusual premise: a vampire masquerades as human […]
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Our weekly exploration of free or inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories we read this week that we wanted you to know about. “Report” by Donald Barthelme (1967, originally published in the New Yorker, free at Jessamyn.com (reprinted by permission), also collected in Sixty Stories) “Our group is against the […]
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Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories that caught our eyes this week. “The Secret” by Mark Lawrence (2015, $1.95 at Audible) I haven’t read Mark Lawrence’s BROKEN EMPIRE series yet, but after reading “The Secret,” I definitely want to. This story gives some background into Brother Sim, […]
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Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories we’ve read that we wanted you to know about. “The Walking-Stick Forest” by Anna Tambour (2014, free on Tor.com, 99c Kindle version) This is an excellent dark and fantastical short story, set in 1924 in Scotland. Athol Farquar is […]
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Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories we’ve read that we wanted you to know about. The Vital Abyss by James S.A. Corey (2015, $2.99 Kindle, $4.95 audio) I haven’t read or watched THE EXPANSE yet, but I purchased some of the related novellas when they […]
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Wild Cards edited by George R.R. Martin Sept 15, 1946: Wild Card Day. When aliens from the planet Takis wanted to test their newly developed virus on a species that is similar to them, naturally, they brought it to Earth. Though they were thwarted by one of their own princes, a foppish alien who has […]
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Aces Abroad edited by George R.R. Martin Aces Abroad is the fourth WILD CARDS anthology edited by George R.R. Martin. It was originally published in 1988, released in a new print edition by Tor in 2015, and released in audio format by Random House Audio in March 2016. It would be best to read the […]
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Inside Straight edited by George R.R. Martin The year 2008 saw the (second?) rebirth of the WILD CARDS series edited and co-written by George R.R. Martin. These are ‘mosaic’ novels — stories written by several authors and set in a shared universe. The first book, Wild Cards, appeared in 1987. Inside Straight (2008) is book 18. […]
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Busted Flush edited by George R.R. Martin Busted Flush is the nineteenth entry in the Wild Cards series of mosaic novels edited by George R.R. Martin. The previous book, Inside Straight is something of a new beginning for the series, a new trilogy with new characters and a couple of new writers. It’s a good point […]
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Fast Ships, Black Sails edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer I was never a big fan of pirates (ninjas, on the other hand…) but nonetheless, the very word evokes adventure and the high seas. Fast Ships, Black Sails doesn’t really stray far from that expectation and delivers eighteen stories marked with action, treachery, and a sense of […]
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Spicy Slipstream Stories edited by Nick Namatas & Jay Lake Slipstream, for me, is a type of fiction that is bizarre and confusing and defies expectations. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, but to quote a passage from the introduction of the book, “You don’t write slipstream, you read it.” And so it was […]
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Warriors edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois FORMAT/INFO: Warriors is 736 pages long divided over twenty short stories and an Introduction by George R.R. Martin. Each short story is preceded by biographical information about the author and a short description of their contribution to the anthology. March 16, 2010 marks the North American Hardcover […]
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Songs of Love and Death edited by George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois Songs of Love and Death is the third anthology that George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois have edited together. Like Warriors and Songs of the Dying Earth, Songs of Love and Death brings together some of the biggest names that SFF has to offer and they set these authors to work on […]
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Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories edited by John Joseph Adams Even people who don’t usually read science fiction will often be familiar with a few classic titles in the “dystopian SF” sub-genre. After all, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and of course the famous Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World are some of the few SF titles […]
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Epic: Legends of Fantasy by John Joseph Adams (editor) Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams, is an anthology of stories written by some of the biggest names in epic fantasy. The book clocks in at over 600 pages not just because it’s very difficult to tell short epic stories (though some of […]
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The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination edited by John Joseph Adams The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination is the latest themed anthology edited by John Joseph Adams — and it’s another good one. This time, Adams has collected a set of short stories featuring the hero’s (or often superhero’s) traditional antagonist: the mad […]
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The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014 edited by Rich Horton I’ve been reading a lot of anthologies lately, including another of the several “Year’s Best” collections (the Jonathan Strahan one). I was pleased to find that, unlike some of the others, this one matched my tastes fairly well for the most part. I […]
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Magic City: Recent Spells edited by Paula Guran Things you should know: 1. This is a reprint anthology. If you read a lot of anthologies in the field, you will probably have read some of these before. I had read three, though two of them were among the best ones, and I enjoyed reading them […]
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The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk edited by Sean Wallace The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk lives up to its name, with 21 works of fiction ranging from short stories to novellas. “Dieselpunk” is the term the coined for concepts that grew out of steampunk but have left the Victorian era behind and are now, for the […]
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Urban Allies edited by Joseph Nassise I’m always impressed when authors work together, and in Urban Allies, editor Joseph Nassise has managed to pair up twenty authors who not only collaborate, but merge their own characters into ten brand-new and original adventures. Each story shares a similar theme: popular characters from existing series or novels […]
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